Batman Begins

After driving their Batman franchise into the ground with 1997’s bloated and campy, Batman and Robin, Warner sought to reboot the series.

Enter Batman Begins, directed by Christopher Nolan, and written by Nolan and David Goyer. Instead of silly camp, Nolan sought to ground his Batman in realism, rationalizing every element of the costume and gadgets.

While this verisimilitude proved a refreshing change, it clashed with the script’s fantastical story which sees Christian Bale play Bruce Wayne, a billionaire orphaned as a child after seeing his parents murdered by a jittery mugger. Bruce grows up seeking vengeance only to find it denied, then loses himself for seven years in East Asia. A mysterious man named Ducard, played by Liam Neeson, approaches Wayne in a Bhutan prison with an invitation to join the League of Shadows, a shadowy cabal fighting injustice.

With the group, Bruce learns the secrets of Ninjitsu. How to engage legions, move silently, disappear and become more than a man in his opponent’s eyes. But Bruce balks at his graduation ceremony when he must take a life. Instead, Bruce burns down the group’s mountain compound and returns to Gotham.

Back in Gotham, with the help of his loyal butler Alfred, played by Michael Caine, Bruce sets out to free the city from corruption. He finds a sort of “Q” to his Bond, in the form of Lucius Fox, a Wayne Enterprises employee played by Morgan Freeman, who supplies Bruce with all his equipment.

As Batman, Bruce breaks the mob’s hold and uncovers a massive conspiracy to destroy Gotham by unleashing a weaponized hallucinogen dispersed through the city’s water supply and activated by a microwave emitter.

That’s a lot of plot. It bloats the movie to well over two hours. Revisiting it, what stands out is how heavy-handed and talky the script plays. Consider Bruce’s first meeting with Ducard, where Ducard says, “A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can’t stop you, then you become something else entirely.”

A bit on-the-nose, but otherwise fine. Except, subsequent scenes have Ducard telling Bruce must be “more than a man,” and later that Bruce needs to be “an idea”, and later “a wraith”. It’s as though Nolan needed to hammer home his justification for a man putting on a bat suit by shoehorning in a theme about symbolic power.

Ducard is an exposition machine, always talking when he’s on screen. Despite the reams of dialogue, he’s as fleshed-out as a typical Bond villain, except where those usually have an obvious motive (money, power, etc…) it’s not clear what Neeson’s character wants.

One wonders why Nolan didn’t simply adapt Frank Miller’s grounded Batman: Year One graphic novel. This would have played to Nolan’s grounded sensibilities by eliminating the supervillains and focusing on the new Batman’s struggle to pry Gotham out of mafia control. No ninjas, microwave emitters, or loquacious villains. Better still, it would have allowed Nolan to explore themes around symbolic power and fear as a motivation in more relatable terms.

Perhaps the studio mandated a comic book villain and plot? It’s important to remember that Nolan wasn’t the A-list name he is now. This movie elevated both him and Bale to that status, so his influence was limited. Likewise, there was no prior art for a “serious” comic book film. Tim Burton’s Batman entries had a dark tone, but they also featured outlandishly cartoonish villains.

Still, it’s telling that three years later, Marvel’s Iron Man eschewed the supervillain (early drafts involved the Mandarin) in favor of a more grounded antagonist. Likewise, this film’s sequel, The Dark Knight, saw Nolan able to craft Heath Ledger’s Joker as less a cartoonish supervillain and more a psychotic force of nature.

Though his efforts to force a serious lens on the fantastic story met with mixed results, Nolan’s grand cinematic visual style helps save the film. After the soundstage-bound Batman outings of Burton and Joel Schumacher, Nolan takes things outdoors and on-location. Cinematographer Wally Pfister utilizes wide-screen panoramas to give the film an epic sheen. Nolan even sets a major action set-piece outdoors, leveraging the Chicago tunnels and streets subbing for Gotham to stage a thrilling car chase where Batman outruns the entire police squad in his urban tank of a Batmobile. Great stuff.

Backing the visuals, James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer build on Danny Elfman’s iconic Batman theme, delivering an epic score full of long notes, highlighted by the “escape from Arkham” sequence where the horns build soft and slow, growing louder until the crescendo comes in as Nolan cuts to a low shot looking up as Batman, cape spread and surrounded by swirling bats, floats down the staircase.

Neeson aside, the performers all shine. Bale possesses both the physical and psychological presence to convince as the driven vigilante, and Nolan surrounds him with an all-star cast. Freeman gets the best lines, such as when Bale inquires about the Batmobile prototype, Freeman replies, “The Tumbler? Oh, you wouldn’t be interested in that…” with a twinkle of mischief in his eye. Caine plays late-career grandpa Caine, perfect for the role, and exemplified by the scene where he wallops a henchman standing guard outside a burning building, then creeps past saying, “I hope you’re not a member of the fire brigade.”

Opposite them, Cillian Murphy’s Jonathan Crane hints at the kinds of supervillains better suited to Nolan’s grounded universe. And Tom Wilkinson’s mobster, Carmine Falcone, could have anchored the film.

As for Neeson, he’s not bad, just superfluous. To his credit, he takes a page from the Peter Cushing handbook and recites the gobbledygook dialogue with the gravitas of Shakespeare.

This latest viewing also proved kinder to Katie Holmes, who plays Bale’s childhood friend and love interest, now a Gotham district attorney. She took a critical beating when the film came out, but, watching it now, her performance, like Neeson’s, seems a casualty of the friction between the comic-book plot and Nolan’s drive for emotional gravitas. While Maggie Gyllenhall replaced her in the sequel, Holmes has far less to work with here, making a comparison unfair.

This isn’t a great movie, but it entertains, despite its muddled script. The charismatic cast, epic cinematography, and iconic score elevate the material, carrying it to the seventh highest grossing movie of the year. It also set the bar for the onslaught of comic-book films that followed. Though it never reaches the emotional depths it aspires to, when it clicks, it’s great fun. Best of all, we don’t have to imagine what the creatives could have done with better material. We have The Dark Knight.